Maria Gowen Brooks

Born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1794, Maria Gowen Brooks became known as an American poet writing under the names Maria del Occidente and A Lover of Fine Arts. She lived through deep personal loss and major changes in fortune, experiences that gave her poetry its intensity and emotional force.

Brooks gained unusual notice for an American writer of her time. The English poet laureate Robert Southey encouraged her work, and Edgar Allan Poe later wrote admiringly about her talent. She is most closely associated with Zophiel, the long poem that brought her lasting recognition.

Later in life she spent time in Cuba, where she died in 1845. Although she is not as widely read today as some of her contemporaries, she remains an interesting figure in early American literature: a poet of ambition, strong feeling, and a life that crossed cultural boundaries.